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In one of the most often cited passages from Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel, The BcII jar, Plath's protagonist, Esther Greenwood, reflects upon the potential paths her life might take and her ultimate inability to make decisions about her future:
I saw my life branching out betöre nie like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this Og tree, starving to death, just because 1 couldn't make up my mind which of the figs 1 would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. (Math 1971 , 62-63)
The passage is a favorite among literary scholars who consistently relate its significance to the larger themes of Plath s novel. Some critics, like Susan Coyle in "images of Madness and Retrieval: An Exploration of Metaphor in The Bell Jar," see the passage as a metaphor for Esther's psychological deterioration; Coyle notes that Esther is "'starving' not simply from indecision but also from an increasing sense of alienation from self and alienation from the world and her potential goals" (1984, 165). Critic Marilyn Yalom in "Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, and Related Poems" explores the way in which the figs in the novel are used as "traditional symbols of female fecundity" (1985, 170) while Linda Wagner-Martin in The Bell Jar: A Novel of the Fifties, grounds her reading historically, noting that "Esther believed 6nnly that there was...